


On Fields of Milk-Flower

by Anjael



Category: Defense of the Ancients | Dota, Dota 2
Genre: F/M, fishboi sven
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-04
Updated: 2017-07-04
Packaged: 2018-11-23 02:35:21
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,257
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11393589
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Anjael/pseuds/Anjael
Summary: Turns out, preparation isn't everything.





	On Fields of Milk-Flower

Every morning, the Ancients decide their heroes; two mysterious and irresistible energies beaming across the planes and plucking out the chosen from wherever they hide. Every morning, those motley few are summoned to the greatest outcroppings of those elemental rocks - ready or not, tugged by invisible strings, arriving only with what they could arm themselves with in time.

And every morning before battle starts in earnest, Rylai sits by the very source of the Radiant, amongst the gently rustling trees, and eats her breakfast.

There's definitely something to be said for strange northern tastes, in Sven's opinion.“Please, no” comes to mind in particular. That's rich, he knows, from his vantage point behind a nearby rock; growing up as he did with crab pot in hand, where whatever you could catch or dredge off Shadeshore's backwater beaches was fair game for dinner, no matter how many eyes it had. But there's taking what you can get and then there's the horrific ammonia-reeking fish that the maiden seems to love, so potent he's surprised nobody has weaponized it yet. She's ever stubborn that it's a delicacy, in the face of everything and everyone that pleads with her otherwise.

Never seeing the ethereal majesty of Icewrack’s glaciers first-hand is just fine, he thinks, if that's the reward you can look forward to be greeted with after slogging for hours through a thousand miles of snow.

('It's fermented!' is not a defence no matter how sweetly she proclaims it, and never will be.)

It's a fine day for fighting strangers to the death, though. Not a cloud in the sky and beatifically quiet. Either everyone else is yet to arrive or they’ve already gone to take their places amid the patchwork trees. Cross-plane summoning is not an exact art; he's every inch the poster child for that today.

No, there’s only the two of them, save the murmur of the wind in the leaves and in the distance, the shopkeeper quietly laying out his mysterious wares.

Just his luck. Maybe if he stays perfectly still out of sight, until she’s done, everything will be alright.

"I know you're there," her laughing voice rings out suddenly over the clearing. "Come on out, it's just larda today, I promise..."

Dammit. 

Far too late now to pretend he’d just dropped his coin-purse or something... And sleight of wit has never been his strong suit anyway. So he unfolds, all six foot whatever of him, slow and as sheepish as you can get while wearing a metric ton of iron. His shoulder-plate probably weighs more than her entire body.

Nothing else for it now. “I wasn’t hiding,” he rumbles, as good at lying as blending into the landscape. Thank the gods for whoever invented swords, to have something for his jittering hands. The healing waters of the fountain behind her have frozen mid-flow like a veil of glowing silk.

“Hah, no, of course you weren’t...” She rummages in her satchel one-handed, sandwich in the other. It's quite possibly the longest moment in his entire life. ”I’ve brought some juice today, if you –“

Finally, just as he thinks honour wouldn’t judge him for running after all, Rylai looks up at where he’s blotting her in shadow, little flask clutched in her white and tiny hand. “-oh.”

The surprise on her face ices him more thoroughly than any snowdrift. Curse the ancients and their errant timing; curse his own foolishness in being caught unready today. But he can’t quite bring himself to curse the forever strangeness of his body, even now.

The only good thing he can think of about being summoned without his helmet, is the blessedly unobstructed view of her delicate, frost-tipped feet curled in the rimy grass. At least there’s that. “Not because of your food, anyway,” he says.

There’s a profound moment of silence in which her cheeks bloom and he wishes the ground would swallow him forever. Then suddenly she flicks her eyes away and takes a little bite of the forgotten sandwich, quick and a nervous, like a bird.

“I like your hair,” she says, very seriously, to the slice of bread.

And before he can think of something less pathetically unoriginal than “thanks”, she’s holding out the other half to him. “Are you hungry?” Maybe mistakes his paralysed hesitation for fussiness, too - “It’s not fish.”

“I guess that’s why I’m still conscious.”

She breaks into a grin at that, and it’s like sunlight; something thaws suddenly between them, and he sits down in the frosted fairy ring of her influence and rests his back against the fountain’s cold, cold stone and breathes her in, the aura water-after-mint in his chest.

The sandwich goes crunch, very gently in his mouth, like everything Rylai holds for too long; there's a thick rich taste, and velvet melting on his tongue that he assumes is some sort of white meat. “What’s this made of?”

“Eat some more first, then I'll tell you.”

He snorts at the ominousness, but it’s good, so he does. The bread is dark and grainy against the softness of the filling, and he tries hard to concentrate on that and not her knee so very close to his, and the way she’s trying not to stare at him out of the corner of her eye and failing something chronic.

It takes a surprisingly short time for a pleasant silence to become uncomfortable; he didn't realise he was quite so out of practice with conversations that didn't come to an abrupt end in a rain of limbs until now. Maybe it's that old memory that whispers 'I wonder which part of you she hates the look of most, the meranth or the human?' that never quite died, always the spike under his heel. Or maybe it's just her magic, numbing him from the edges in even as it makes his heart pound wild.

"Hey," she says softly, after a thoughtful while. "Don't worry about it. Everyone gets caught out by that summoning, eventually." Another bite. "Just be grateful you were wearing pants at the time! I mean, how else would that guy stay in business if we could just bring whatever we wanted?" She salutes the distant shopkeeper with the juice flask. It clinks and she rattles it in annoyance, sighs. " Okay, I guess we don't have juice after all, we just have more ice. Sorry, Sven."

He looks over and it's probably the least he's cared about juice, ever. Her mouth is so, so blue; if he just leaned over and kissed her right now would his skin stick to hers, like metal in winter?

The blare of the familiar, echoing fog-horn sounds out across the sky.

In the breath of a moment Rylai licks the last crumbs from her fingers; the frozen grass crinkles and then she's straightening her furs and stretching her legs and checking her bag for battle supplies. "Let's go together, shall we?" Almost imperiously, she holds out her hand, as if there's no question that her frame could lift him up if he needed it, no matter what.

"It was seal fat, by the way," she smiles. "They say it's good for keeping you warm."

There's still time to buy a helmet, if he hurries. But instead he takes her hand, and his sword, and the magic surging in his mongrel blood, into the forest; a maiden and her knight and nothing else besides.

And even if it's only for a little while, Sven feels as though he might never be truly cold again.

**Author's Note:**

> Done as a birthday gift for a friend. Critique welcome!


End file.
